Split second, p.20
Split Second, page 20
The motel was located in San Ysidro, a San Diego district bordering Mexico to the south. No one would expect them to remain in Southern California, and if they did, certainly not in one of its least glamorous locales, home to arguably the world’s largest land border crossing, where the highway branched into twenty-five lanes, each with a booth, to accommodate almost twenty million vehicle crossings, and ten million pedestrian crossings, into the United States each year.
Blake was playing a shell game, and hiding his peas under a shell in San Ysidro was an unlikely move, and one that should help keep them all alive for a little longer.
He brought his groggy companions up to speed on what had happened after they had collapsed onto Greg Soyer’s kitchen floor, and how they had ended up in a seedy motel in San Ysidro. Both were duly grateful and expressed awe at the skills that had allowed him to slip a nearly perfect trap.
Blake had walked to a nearby sub shop while they were sleeping off the knockout gas and was able to offer his two companions an assortment of sandwiches, chips, and drinks, which they gratefully devoured. Being knocked unconscious apparently stoked one’s appetite, although Jenna playfully complained that she was making too great a sacrifice having to eat a meal that didn’t come out of a box of granola bars.
When they had been fed and had recovered their clarity of thought, Blake said, “I’m not going to sugarcoat it. We’ve lost this round big. The only positive news is that I checked, and before they got to him, Greg did manage to copy the contents of Nathan’s file to a cloud account, and I was able to access it with the password. So they got a copy, but at least we have one too.”
“So where do we go from here?” asked Jenna. “We could still have Dan study Nathan’s work and then make decisions from there like we planned.”
“Not yet,” said Blake grimly. “Before I do anything else, I intend to get Greg back. And I have to be honest with you, I don’t care what it takes.”
“How?” asked Walsh.
“By talking to the bastard who took him,” he replied, holding his phone out in front of him.
Jenna nodded appreciatively. “I forgot about that,” she said.
“Forgot about what?” said Walsh.
“Sorry,” replied Blake. “I told you about my run-in with a killer named Rourk. But I should have mentioned that I recovered his phone. He had called his superior, and Jenna put this number into my phone.”
“I see,” said Walsh.
“I didn’t want to use it just yet,” said Blake. “I wanted to wait until we understood more about what we were dealing with. The nature of Nathan’s discovery and some sense of the players and their motivations.”
A dark, intense scowl came over his face. “But this timetable has changed,” he growled. “They know who we are. And they have Greg.”
Blake nodded at Jenna. “So let’s call this guy. And do what we have to do.”
“Can he trace the call?” said Jenna.
“No. When I first set up shop as a PI, Greg modified my phone. I can put it in a mode that Greg guaranteed can’t be traced.”
“That’s good enough for me,” said Jenna.
Blake turned to the physicist. “Dan,” he said, “I want you to listen in, but I don’t want to reveal that you’re with us. They know Jenna hired me and that we’re together. They almost certainly know you’re involved, but why confirm it? And they can’t be sure we didn’t split up. So let’s not give them any more information than we need to.”
“I understand,” said Walsh. “I won’t make a sound.”
“Okay then,” said Blake. “Let’s do this. It’s time to find out what the hell this is all about.”
36
Blake set his phone to speaker, audio-only, and had Myla tie it into the microphone and sound system of the motel’s television set. This way, he and Jenna could speak normally in the direction of the television and their voices would be picked up easily, and all three in the room could hear and see audio or video coming from whoever answered.
As expected, Blake was forced to leave a message, since whoever they were calling wouldn’t recognize an incoming call from the PI’s phone, and would let it go to voicemail. But also as expected, Blake’s phone rang minutes later.
He had a feeling his call would get attention in a hurry.
Blake and Jenna had taken up positions sitting on a solid beige bedspread at the end of the king-sized bed, facing the television, and Walsh sat to their side, at a small desk, facing the same direction.
Blake glanced at Jenna, who nodded her readiness.
“Aaron Blake here,” said the private detective as he accepted the call.
“I got your message,” said a baritone male voice. The video was also off at the other end, so this had become an old-fashioned audio-only call. “I have to say the timing couldn’t be more ironic, since we didn’t know who you were until about an hour ago.”
“Sure you didn’t,” said Blake skeptically. “And who are you?”
“My name is Edgar Knight. Do you mind if I call you Aaron?”
“How very polite,” growled Blake icily. “Sure, call me Aaron. And while you’re being polite, I have an idea: stop trying to kill Jenna Morrison and everyone she touches.”
“It was never my intention to hurt Jenna or anyone else involved. Can I assume she’s there with you?”
“She is,” said Blake. “But let’s cut the bullshit already. I’ll tell you why I called. You have Greg Soyer. Keep the flash drive, which is all you’ve ever cared about anyway, for reasons that escape me. But return Greg unhurt. You don’t need him. And I have a copy of the information on that drive also. It’s stored in the cloud and rigged with a fail-safe. If a week ever passes without both me and Jenna Morrison having entered a code, it’s automatically released into the wild. And we can also proactively trigger it at any time.”
He leaned closer to the television and its microphone. “So I’ll offer an exchange. You give me Greg Soyer. And in return, I won’t blast Nathan Wexler’s findings to every last corner of the Internet.”
There was long silence. “I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t play stupid!” thundered Blake. “It won’t help you. You sent a team of Green Berets to retrieve Nathan Wexler’s thumb drive, and to capture my friend Greg.”
“Oh shit!” said Knight, as though he had just been informed he had an inoperable brain tumor. “You’ve got the wrong guy. I had nothing to do with this. A man named Lee Cargill is behind this. Which is exceedingly bad news,” he finished grimly.
“Who is Lee Cargill?”
“Look, Aaron,” said the caller, “you’re right. It is time to cut the bullshit. It’s time for me to explain everything. Because there’s a lot going on here, and you’re operating under some very false assumptions. As a first show of good faith, I’m going to start sending video from my end.”
A moment later the man’s image appeared on Blake’s phone and the motel’s thirty-inch television monitor. He was dressed casually and looked to be in his forties, with receding brown hair, parted down the middle, and eyes that were an intense dark blue. He had the look of a man long used to being in charge, and one who didn’t suffer fools gladly. His narrow face showed the hint of several pockmarks, perhaps acne scars from his adolescence. He stared calmly at the camera and didn’t speak, as if knowing his audience would appreciate a brief pause to study his appearance.
“I trust you can see me,” said the image on their television after a few seconds had passed. “Let me say again, in no uncertain terms, that I don’t have your man, this . . . Greg Soyer. In fact, I have no idea who that is. And while I do want Dr. Wexler’s flash drive, I don’t have it.”
“Why should we believe anything you say?” snapped Blake.
“Look, I understand how you feel,” replied Knight. “And I have some sense of what you’ve been going through. Especially you, Jenna.”
“No you don’t!” hissed Jenna, chiming in for the first time. “Don’t even pretend that you do!”
Knight nodded gravely, but Blake also had the sense that he was pleased to get this confirmation that Jenna was on the call.
“I know it’s been a nightmare for you,” said Knight, “and I apologize for that.” He paused. “But let me start at the beginning and lay it all out for you. And hopefully you’ll begin to understand the whys of the past few days.”
Dan Walsh remained perfectly silent but quietly moved his chair forward a few feet so he could be in line with his companions, see their expressions, and gesture to them if he felt this was useful.
“To begin with,” said Knight, “I am an experimental scientist. In my not-so-humble opinion, the best who ever lived. I have an intuitive sense of how things should work—and what technical goals might be achievable. Think of me as akin to an autistic savant, those strange people able to memorize phone books or calculate square roots as fast as a computer. Or a chess prodigy, able to see all the pieces as lines of force, able to remember the positions of thirty games simultaneously and win them all while blindfolded.”
“Okay already,” said Blake, rolling his eyes. “We’ll stipulate you’re good at what you do. Is this going anywhere?”
Knight smiled, either not offended, or doing his best to pretend to be affable no matter what was thrown at him. “By the time I was thirteen, I had come up with inventions that netted me millions. The media was calling me the next Edison. Long story short, the head of Black Ops R&D got wind of my abilities and plucked me right up after I graduated MIT. They made an offer I couldn’t refuse. Full access to a dizzying array of expensive toys—many of them being kept secret from the public—an unlimited equipment budget, and a chance to work on the most interesting problems in all of science and technology. And royalties on any tech I developed once it was declassified for commercial use, which could ultimately be worth billions. As I proved myself over the years, I was eventually given unlimited freedom to pursue whatever was of interest to me.”
He paused and then leaned in toward his unseen audience. “Four years ago, I joined a group headed by a man named Lee Cargill, who had a brilliant track record of assembling teams in such a way as to produce extraordinary results. In this case, he was working on finding practical uses for dark energy.”
“There are no practical uses for dark energy,” said Jenna. “Nathan told me that repeatedly.”
“This was certainly the going wisdom when I began, that this energy field could never be harnessed. Still, with something this leading edge, I was eager to apply my particular genius to the problem. As is sometimes the case with Black Ops projects, Cargill had fabricated the footprint of a large tech company as a front, which he named Q5 Enterprises.”
“Is the Q for quintessence?” asked Blake. Given what Jenna had told him about this being considered the fifth force, Q5 seemed an appropriate name.
“Very good,” said Knight, nodding approvingly at this demonstration of Blake’s knowledge.
“So I joined Q5,” he continued. “And Cargill. If this were a real tech company, you could think of him as the chief executive officer and me as the chief technical officer.”
Knight sighed loudly. “I know most people believe everything the government does, especially within Black Ops, is all about war mongering, for military uses only. But this isn’t true. Yes, the military gets first dibs and can elect to keep findings secret for a time, but many of the greatest tech advances in history came about as military projects that were initially covert. Secret research during World War II on radar spawned numerous non-military applications, including the microwave oven, initially called the Radar Range. Efforts to crack Nazi codes led to much of the foundation for modern computers. Military rockets led to the space program. Jet engine research led to . . . well, jets. And both the Internet and GPS were initially developed by the US Department of Defense.”
“We get it,” said Jenna disdainfully. “Once the military skims off anything that can be used to kill and destroy, they sometimes allow their technology to be used constructively. So you worked in secret, on a Black Ops team, but you gave your little speech just now so we would know that your giant heart has always been in the right place,” she spat, her tone dripping with acid.
“That was the point I was trying to convey,” admitted Knight calmly, “although without the sarcasm. But just because what I said paints me as more humanitarian than monster, this doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
“Sure it doesn’t,” said Jenna skeptically. “But go on.”
“Let me cut to the chase. After years of effort, I succeeded—almost two years ago. I won’t go into details of how I cooked up the apparatus, or why my intuition told me it would work, but it did. And not in the way anyone expected. Turns out I could safely harness quintessence—but only to one end.” He paused for effect. “To send matter back in time.”
The silence that seized the motel room was profound, but only lasted a few seconds. “You mean to say you’ve actually done this?” blurted out Blake in disbelief.
“I have,” said Knight. “Believe me, it took some time for us to realize what was happening, and months for us to gain enough understanding to apply this routinely.” He arched one eyebrow. “Anyone want to guess how far back in time I’m talking about?”
Jenna’s mouth fell open, and she was too stunned to speak.
“A little more than forty-five microseconds?” whispered Blake.
“Excellent,” said Knight. “That was a little test. It appears you are familiar with Nathan Wexler’s work. Yes, forty-five millionths of a second.”
“So what are you saying,” asked Jenna, “that Nathan just stumbled upon work you had already done?”
“Yes and no,” said Knight cryptically. “But allow me to table that question and get back to it later.”
“It’s your show,” said Jenna.
“So I could send matter back in time,” continued Knight. “Whatever I could fit inside my device—my time machine for want of a better term—which was about the size of a Rubik’s cube. But soon I expanded this device to its theoretical maximum. The largest time machine possible is about the size of your typical buried treasure chest from the movies, or say a Coleman cooler you’d use to keep drinks cold at the beach.”
“Impressive scientific precision,” said Jenna caustically.
“I could give you the exact number of cubic inches out to five decimal places, but I thought I’d try to give you a visual image that would give you a better sense of it.”
“So is that where you are now?” asked Blake. “Anything you can fit inside your time travel suitcase, you can send a fraction of a second into the past?”
“A little more complicated than a suitcase,” said Knight, “but essentially correct. Forty-five microseconds.”
“So a split second in the truest sense of the phrase,” said Blake. “You are, literally, splitting a second into millions of pieces. But so what? Why is this information something you’re so willing to slaughter innocents to protect?”
“I reject your use of the word slaughter,” protested Knight vigorously, “along with your implication of just how willing I am to hurt people. But I’ll wait to defend myself until I’m through bringing you up to speed.”
“The question remains,” said Blake, “how does sending something back an instant help you?”
Knight allowed the corners of his mouth to turn up into the slightest of smiles. “Almost no one grasps the implications right away,” he said. “It does seem useless to go back in time less than the blink of an eye. But it’s not. You’re thinking about the effect the wrong way. Don’t think of it as a time machine.”
He paused once again for effect. “Think of it as a duplication machine.”
37
All three residents of room twenty-seven of the Best Border Inn stared at the screen as if they hadn’t heard correctly.
“What?” whispered Jenna and Blake at the same time.
“A duplication machine?” repeated Blake stupidly.
“Yes,” said Knight. “You heard me. A duplication machine. You’ll understand better if we forget about microseconds for now. Just imagine for a moment that you could send your cell phone back in time a week, to your earlier self. Wouldn’t the you from a week earlier now have two cell phones?”
There was a pause in the conversation as all three inhabitants considered this scenario.
“Well, sure,” said Jenna. “But that’s a week. If I could only send my phone back a millionth of a second, I’d have two cell phones trying to inhabit the same space. Wouldn’t that lead to an explosion? Like a matter-antimatter explosion, I guess, only bigger?”
“Not at all,” said Knight smugly. “You’ve been misled by the science fiction you’ve been fed all of your life. Science fiction gets half of it right, but not all. When you travel through time, you travel through time only. Not space.”
“I have no idea what that means,” said Blake.
“Say you’re in California today. You board a plane and arrive in Australia tomorrow. Once you’re down under, say you activate a time machine and go back a day. Where are you?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. “Science fiction would have you believe you’d be in Australia a day earlier. Right? You wouldn’t end up in California, just because you happened to be there the day earlier. You don’t retrace your actual steps. You would move through time, but not space. Wherever you activate the time machine is where you end up, just at an earlier time.”
“And you’re saying this isn’t correct?” asked Jenna.
“No. I’m saying this is correct. You maintain your precise position in space. The only thing that changes is your position in time. But it’s not that easy. And this is where science fiction tends to get it wrong. Because Australia, itself, moves. If it didn’t, you would end up there. But the Earth doesn’t stand still. You’d be pinned in space. But a day earlier, Australia wasn’t anywhere near your pinned position. You activate your time machine and go back a day. You arrive without changing your spatial position in the universe. The only trouble is that yesterday, the Earth was millions of miles distant from where it is today. Wouldn’t you find yourself in outer space?”
